Mea Culpa: how many shoes does Donald Trump have?

John Rentoul minds our language in last week’s Independent

No cheap flats here: racegoers take off their shoes to rest their feet on the third day of the Royal Ascot horserace meeting in June (AP)

One price of The Independent’s huge success in attracting readers in the US is that we have to work ever harder to maintain a consistent British English style. It is easy enough to observe the conventions of spelling and grammar that differ between British and US English, although we sometimes miss them, not least because we now employ so many American journalists in the US.

What is harder to avoid, though, is American idioms, many of which are finding their way into British English anyway. Ian K Watson, one of our UK readers, was puzzled to come across the phrase, “shoes appear to be dropping fast”, in an article about the FBI raiding Donald Trump’s home in Florida.

I think it is an extension of the US phrase “waiting for the other shoe to drop”, which means bracing yourself for a bad thing you know is going to happen, derived from living in cheap flats – sorry, apartments – in which you could hear the residents above taking their shoes off, one by one.